E3 2003: Lords of EverQuest

Share.

The world of Norrath goes into the real-time strategy market.

By Dan Adams

EverQuest is still a very popular game among role-playing geeks everywhere. The backstory and history of the world of Norrath is deep and full of life and detail. For this reason and more, Sony Online decided to step outside of the online arena for once and create a different offline game based on the same environment and history, but move into a completely different genre as well. Lords of EverQuest takes the trolls, ogres, elves, gnomes, humans, dwarves and the rest into battle and the real-time strategy arena.

Lords of EQ takes a little jaunt back in time. About 10,000 years before the time that EverQuest is now set. The story follows the fiction behind Ralosek, the god of war. This cheeky bastard decided at one point that he was better than all the other gods and his races, the ogres and trolls, were better than all the other races. So he set about taking the entire world as his own and installing himself as the king of all. As you might expect, the rest of the gods and their races didn't really like this idea so much, and after a bit of fighting and struggle, the rest of the gods were victorious, throwing Ralosek down and reducing his powerful children. Where the ogres and trolls were once intelligent and awesome creatures, they suddenly became dumb and slow. And once again, as you might expect, they didn't like that so much either. After the gods took away the ogres magic, several of them went completely insane and died. But before the last magical ogre wasted away to nothing, he managed to tell of a book that could turn mortal creatures into deities. So Ralosek's creatures were sent to find the book so that he could elevate his creatures to a deified state and take down the other mortal creatures and their gods.

Over 36 single player missions and an estimated 25 hours of gameplay, Lords of EverQuest will give players the opportunity to play as all alignments in the struggle. Good, Neutral, and Evil all have their say in the argument between the gods. Each of the sides will have its own creatures and units. Among the units there will be around 125 spells and abilities and 200 equipable items and weapons.

One of the cool things about the units in the game is that they all gain levels as they go. They'll increase in power and all of their attributes and at any point, you'll be able to pick two of your units and dub them knights. These knights will have a small area of influence around them that make the units in their proximity stronger. The catch to the knights is that they gain levels slower after you've knighted them. So you'll have to balance whether you want to keep raising some of your units up before you knight them or knight lower level creatures to get the knight benefits for the rest of your troops and suffer from the slow leveling afterwards. When you do decide to create a knight, the model of the creature will get bigger and meaning and adopt some new armor to demonstrate his stature.

The comparisons to WarCraft III will certainly be flying around with this one due to the Lords that function like the Heroes in Blizzard's game. The Lords are special units in the game that aren't upgrades from regular units, but more powerful all around. These are the only units that can carry the items found in playing the game as well. You'll be able to choose from 5 on each side. They'll range in ability and style so players will be able to customize their army.

In order to make units less dispensable to players, Lords of EverQuest will allow you to carry over some units from level to level. This works sort of in the same way that Warlords: Battlecry allowed. At the end of each level, you'll be able to choose a number of units based on point cost. The difference from Warlords is that you gain points to spend by completing side quests in missions and finding extra stuff.

The game itself works in a much more action-oriented fashion with a much lesser focus on resource gathering. However, you'll still have to build a town and create units just the same. The idea is to get a lot of units out and fighting with a lot of other units. As with the actual EverQuest game, you'll find plenty of creeps (about 90 different types) around to raise your unit levels before you actually confront enemy troops.

Look for more detailed information once we've had some time to recover from the show and collect the various cups that have collected our leaking brains.